Breakthrough ruling on puberty blockers in US.

Meanwhile, blue states like California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington have passed legislation to ensure access to hormonal and surgical interventions for youth, expand insurance coverage for these procedures, and shield medical providers from legal liability.

Emphasis added.

Why would you want to shield medical providers from legal liability?

That says everything about these lawmakers!

What a choice.

As ever, it's girls and women who will suffer most, from gender surgeries or from denial of access to abortion.

Blood hell. So if you need an abortion you need to be in a blue state. if you want to stop your kids being medicalised you need to be in a red state. What a mess. We need women-centred politics.

Seems to be good news in Nebraska

https://unherd.com/thepost/us-states-hit-the-brakes-on-gender-affirming-care/

Oh, that's interesting.

Preference falsification, indeed.

It was my understanding that the ruling that States can ban medical procedures if they decide they are immoral is a ruling using the precedent set by the Supreme Court when it overturned Roe v. Wade. Since Roe v. Wade had relied on/created a constitutional right to privacy about medical matters that the current Supreme Court decided was an error and not part of the constitution.

So the 6th circuit using the reasoning here is just accepting that precedent. It’s a blow to abortion rights in the sense of showing there is no hope that they would find some wiggle room to protect abortion rights, but it isn’t, in itself a precedent setting ruling as the Supreme Court set that precedent.

But the handwringing about that seems pretty pointless as the 6th Circuit is very conservative and there was never really any hope they’d find wiggle room to protect abortion rights.

Just because rent-a-quote transwomen are writing articles desperately trying to compare puberty blockers to birth control doesn’t mean limiting one will impact on the other.

It’s making an emotive link that isn’t there.

And why the handwringing that stopping children accessing untested drugs will affect a woman’s right to an abortion and not about making abortion an “all gender” issue (as “men can get pregnant too”) which means men have an equal voice in whether abortions happen or not? 🙄

Catching up on this one here after seeing it first on Twitter.

This really does feel like it could be a watershed moment for the US. It's good to understand that it's just a limited number of states but anything at all that is federal sounds beneficial. Are any of the states that come under this jurisdiction Democrat?
Either way, it's a solid precedent case which many states outside this jurisdiction will be looking at. Coupled with Louisiana (I think?) gender clinics recently backing off from "gender affirming care" because of the recent changes that would allow people to sue more effectively if they detransition, it really does feel like the US is going in only one direction and that this awful medical scandal is in its death to throes.

Matt Walsh is excellent on the topic of the impact of gender identity belief on children. His tweets on this case are very clearly laid out. I disagree with him on several things, but not on this.

I didn't see a link to the judgment so here's one:

https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/23a0221p-06.pdf (70 pages)

I agree with you on the wisdom of letting voters decide what medical procedures are moral or not - there is not much logic going on in US politics or court rulings are the moment.

however, one of the heartening things about the abortion debate in the US is that voters actually remain in favour of it being legal and available, even in conservative states. They’ve actually voted down measures to ban it when given the opportunity.

however, if it was Covid treatments or vaccines, it may be a different answer.

Back in the early trump days and the Muslim ban I donated to aclu. What a dummy I was.

We cannot and should not be anything than other than deeply angry about the first part- that voters can reject medical treatments they disagree with, even though this ruling concerns children. Bang go abortion rights!

Take Matt Walsh out of this.
He is just the messenger.
And TRAs are throwing abortion rights and vaccine access at women in desperation.

ACLU are really bad at their job aren’t they?

They can’t identify actual civil liberty issues, such as women not being forced to be undressed in front of naked men.

They can’t realise when they are making crap legal arguments.

And they can’t even identify when their arguments are illogical and incoherent.

They are a disgrace.

The plaintiffs were shooting themselves in the foot on several levels. Fancy making a parents rights argument in this situation. If they’d succeeded, all the laws in blue states threatening parents with loss of custody id they don’ttrans their kids would also have been unconstitutional. Not to mention the schools socially transitioning kids behind parents’ backs.

Yes, Matt Walsh makes a similar point in his video. He points out the contradiction in TRAs encouraging schools to trans children behind their parents' backs on the one hand and arguing in favour of "parents' rights" on the other.

Look, I disagree with Matt Walsh on many things but he's right on this.

The whole majority opinion is worth a read. A model of clarity.

The plaintiffs were shooting themselves in the foot on several levels. Fancy making a parents rights argument in this situation. If they’d succeeded, all the laws in blue states threatening parents with loss of custody id they don’t trans their kids would also have been unconstitutional. Not to mention the schools socially transitioning kids behind parents’ backs.

The dissent was the usual “assigned at birth” words salad.

If suddenly lots of doctors were offering the amputation of healthy arms and there was an epidemic of children wanting this due to social contagion, would it be ok /make any logical sense to say 'oh well, let's just let children amputate their arms if they want to, despite there being overwhelming demonstration of harm and no obvious benefit. If we restrict this then it might affect access to the flu vaccine and contraceptives (both of which have robust evidence bases behind them)'? Because that would be ridiculous.

What the courts should be demanding is that 'gender affirming' care has to meet the standards for evidence of benefits and risks that other drugs / procedures have to meet. At the moment they don't. And they won't ever be able to demonstrate that there is a good clinical basis for these treatments IMO

The thing is that most vaccines and medications (including contraceptives) and medical procedures (like abortions) follow proper medical protocols including having robust evidence about benefit and risk.

Puberty blockers used for 'gender reassignment' (not for precocious puberty) have basically bugger all evidence of benefit and there are known risks (with the evidence of irreversible damaging harm growing fast). Any other drugs with that lack of evidence of safety / paucity of demonstration of benefit would not be used. Their use falls well outside what would be acceptable balancing of risks for any other medication or medical procedure.

The only answer to give to that is the true one.

It's possible for laws to be passed about medical treatments that are either dangerous or immoral. As it should be. The public and legislators can discuss whether those things apply to any kind of medical treatments. The decisions will be completely dependent on what the nature of the medical procedure actually is, it's impossible to generalize.

If some people would like to ensure that things like contraception remain legal by making the claim that it is not possible to outlaw medical procedures of any kind, they are fools.

Yes. Abortion etc are separate issues.

My worry is that it suits the TRAs to have us too scared to talk about this stuff because we’re worried about all these separate women’s rights issues. They want us to shut up because we fear that saying no to puberty blockers and such like is a slippery slope.

They want us to worry that the wrong types of people might agree with us (and lots of other people) about a set of practices that want to promote and euphemise medical interventions that impede young people’s basic human development for ideological reasons so we will shut up.

The response of ‘what might this mean for abortion?’ is not helpful in this context. It’s not relevant to this.

I worry about the muddling of puberty blockers and other TRA aims in with abortion/contraception/vaccines etc.

I agree! The Matt Walshs of the US want nothing more than to stick it to the feminists and deny women access to birth control and abortion. Mr. Anti-all abortions even for pregnant 10 yr old girls doesn't care about women's healthcare.

Wow talk about shooting yourself in the foot 🤭 I really hope that this ruling will be used in as many cases as possible

I worry about the muddling of puberty blockers and other TRA aims in with abortion/contraception/vaccines etc.

Fear mongering about abortion or contraception is a brilliant tactic used by TRAs to shut down any criticism or attempts to stop the use of puberty blockers.

We need to fight the issues around women’s reproductive health and choices separately to any of this. The arguments and issues are not the same.